SendGrid Email Marketing Service Tutorial: How To Create a Recipient List

With the recent release of our Marketing Email Service, we’re happy to share a new video tutorial initiative from our Support team, VidGrid. VidGrid will walk you through each step of creating your email marketing campaign to make sure that you have the best experience possible.

In this first video, Customer Success Rep, Anisha walks you through how to create a recipient list.

Video Transcription:

Let’s start off by going to the top menu, under “My Recipients,” and creating a new one. The first thing you need to do is give your list a name. I am going to call mine “My Recipients,” and go to the next step.

There are three ways that you can add recipients to your list.

The first way would be to use our simple upload form. This allows you to upload a CSV or text file that you already have saved onto your computer. Make sure you check this little box beneath if your first row contains headers. Let me show you what I’m talking about. As you can see in my CSV file, I have headers in the top row. These headers are “email”, “domain,” “ID”, and “role”. You want to make sure that this box is checked, so that your list is uploaded correctly.

The second way to add recipients to a list would be to add them manually. This is basically a spreadsheet, and you can add a column, by clicking these “add a column” buttons, and add rows. As you can see, the top row is available for your headers. You want to keep in mind that these headers can be used as custom tags. With these custom tags, you will be able to personalize your emails. If you want more information on how to use them, view our custom tags video.

Another way to add recipients to your list would be to use an external URL. If you have a CSV file already on your server and you don’t want to recreate or do any extra work, you can just copy and paste that URL into this field and click “check.” This check button will check the URL to see if it’s valid. Be sure to check this box if the first row contains headers. Check “activate dynamic mode” if you want your recipient list on your SendGrid account to update when your CSV file on your server is updated. By checking this box, you are telling our system to recheck that URL before every send. This will ensure that you are sending to an updated list.

Now I am just going to go ahead and finish out the process to create my recipient list, and I am going to do this by uploading my list. Click the “Upload” button and search for the file, making sure my check box is checked for first row containing headers. I see that everything looks good and I’m just going to go ahead and verify and save.

And as you can see my recipient list was successfully saved and created. Thanks for watching!

Stay tuned for more installments from our VidGrid tutorial series here on the blog or check out the whole library here.

Author: Jillian Wohlfarth

As SendGrid's Senior Manager of Content, Jillian is responsible for ensuring that SendGrid provides valuable thought leadership content through the blog, whitepapers, webcasts, case studies, and more. An editor and writer by trade, Jillian considers The Chicago Manual of Style one of her favorite reads.